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ERIC NYLUND
193
babble were: uncovering the fragment of divinity, and illuminat-
ing shard of the gods to exist the perfect moment that vanishes in
the blink of an eye but lasts forever, and collecting the stars left
by the giants.
A literal translation was not a problem. It was the meaning be-
hind the words that eluded her. Without the proper cultural refer-
ences, this was all gibberish.
It had to mean something to someone, however. Perhaps she
could use part of the dissected Covenant AI to help. It had spo-
ken to her, so it was partially fluent with human idioms. She
might be able to reverse-engineer its translation software.
Cortana isolated the AI code and began the
retrieval-and-unpacking process. This would take time; she'd
compressed the code, and the reconstitution process would
require a good deal of her reduced processing power.
While she waited, she examined the Covenant reactors. They
used a pinched magnetic field to heat the tritium plasma. It was
surprisingly primitive. Without better hardware, though, there
was little she could do to improve their effectiveness.
Power. She needed more if she was going to head back insystem
to rendezvous with the Master Chief. The Covenant weren't go-
ing to sit by and wait for them to hook up, bid a fond adieu, and
then escape.
Logically, there was only one way to do this: She was going to
have to fight and kill them all.
She could conserve her ship's power and fire the plasma
weapons as they were designed. That, however, would only de-
lay the inevitable. A dozen ships against one—even Captain
Keyes wouldn't have survived such a lopsided tactical situation.
She deliberated how to solve this problem, spun off a multi-
tasking routine that listed her resources, and filtered them in a
creativity-probability matrix, hoping to find an inspired match.
The unpacking of the alien AI's routines finished. The code
appeared to her as a vast cross section of geological strata: gray
granite variables and blood red sandstone visual processors and
oily dark function films. But there were dozens of code layers
she didn't even recognize.
The translation algorithms, however, were in the top layers of
this structure, glistening like a vein of gold-laced quartz. She